height; she was slim too and although she had a lovely face it couldn’t match the beauty of the other three girls. She grinned at them suddenly. ‘Me for the next bath—I’ll be ten minutes,’ and started for the bathroom, shedding the guernsey as she went.
They collected in her room as they were ready, squabbling mildly and criticising each other’s dresses as she sat at the dressing table putting up her hair. She had combed it back from her forehead and arranged it in three thick loops on her neck and it had taken a long time, but the result, she considered, staring at her reflection in the mirror, had been worth the effort. Rather different from her hair-style of that afternoon—it was a pity… She dismissed the thought and said briskly: ‘If we’re ready we’d better go down.’ She eyed her sisters with loving admiration. ‘I must say you all look smashing, my dears.’ And they did, with their fair hair combed smoothly over their magnificent shoulders and their gay dresses. As usual, they would create a small sensation when they entered the restaurant presently. She smiled proudly at them, for they were such splendid creatures and the dearest sisters.
Their parents were waiting for them downstairs. Victoria’s mother, splendid in a violet crêpe dress which was the exact foil to her grey, simply-dressed hair, was sitting by the small fire in the sitting room, and her father was standing at the window, looking out on to the harbour, but he turned round as they went in and crowded around him, for they hadn’t seen him since early that morning. He saluted them each in turn with a fatherly kiss and being just a little taller than they were, he was able to look down upon them with benign affection. He said now:
‘You all look very nice, I must say. Shall we walk or do you want the car?
A routine question which was merely a concession to their finery, for the hotel was only a few minutes’ walk away, but it was asked each time they dined there, and that was frequently, to mark each of their birthdays as well as the first evening of Victoria’s holidays. They chorused a happy ‘no, thank you’, picked up their various coats and wraps and left the house in a cheerful chattering group with Mr and Mrs Parsons leading the way.
The restaurant was full, but they had a table in one of the windows overlooking the harbour. Mrs Parsons, sweeping regally through the doors, acknowledged the head waiter’s bow with a gracious smile and sailed in his wake, seemingly oblivious of the four eye-catching girls behind her, and they, by now used to being stared at and not in the least disconcerted by it, followed her; Stephanie first, then Amabel, Louise and lastly Victoria, quite dwarfed by her sisters and her father behind her.
They sat down, with Victoria on her father’s left with her back to the semi-circular room, and her parents facing each other at each end of the table. They had finished their soup and were awaiting their crabmeat patties when Stephanie, sitting opposite Victoria, remarked:
‘There’s a man across the room—I’ve never seen him before.’ A remark sufficient to awaken interest in the two younger Miss Parsons, for they knew most of the young men on the island and they had deduced, quite rightly, that the man was good-looking and tolerably young—otherwise she wouldn’t have noticed him.
It was Louise, sitting next to Victoria, who asked: ‘How old? Is he nice-looking? Dark or fair?’ Before her sister could reply her mother interposed.
‘Louise, you should know better, encouraging Stephanie like that! We don’t know him, I fancy, do we, dear?’ She raised her eyebrows at her husband, who laughed.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I can hardly inspect the man without embarrassment on both our parts, but if you’ve never seen him before, then I’m fairly sure that I haven’t either.’
Victoria speared her last morsel of patty. ‘All the same, I’m dying of curiosity and I can’t turn round, can I?’ She looked enquiringly at her mother, who smiled a little and said, ‘Oh, very well, but he’s with a very pretty young woman, so it really is a waste of Stephanie’s time.’
Stephanie ignored the young woman. ‘He’s very large and he’s got dark hair and one of those high foreheads—he doesn’t laugh very much, but he looks swoony when he smiles. He’s got one of those straight noses, just a little too big for his face, if you know what I mean—he turns me on.’
This vivid description met with her sister’s interested approval, but her mother said briskly before any of them could speak:
‘That is a vulgar expression which I dislike, Stephanie, you will be good enough to remember that.’
‘Amabel says it,’ muttered her youngest born rebelliously.
‘Amabel is twenty-one,’ said her mother sweepingly as she helped herself to poached salmon, and Stephanie made a mutinous face so that Victoria said swiftly, before the mutiny should become an open one:
‘I thought of going down to Castle Cornet tomorrow to see Uncle Gardener’—the curator and an old family friend, and such a ferocious horticulturist that they had called him by that name all their lives. ‘Anyone want to come with me?’
A cheerful babble of argument broke out as she had known it would. Her holiday this time was a short one, and her family, anxious that she shouldn’t waste a precious minute of it, were full of suggestions.
‘It’ll have to be in the afternoon, then,’ said Amabel. ‘Remember we’re going to the market in the morning and you’ve got some shopping to do—if you don’t do it straight away you’re sure to forget it and go back with only half the things you want.’
‘There’s a dress in the Jaguar shop,’ began Louise. They settled down to a happy discussion as to what Vicky should do with her days and the stranger across the restaurant was forgotten—or almost. Only Stephanie glanced across at him once or twice and Victoria, eating her ice pudding with a healthy appetite, wondered if he could possibly be the man she had met that afternoon. It seemed so unlikely that she dismissed the idea from her mind and bent it instead to the conversation going on around her.
They lingered over the cheese board and the coffee; it was only when Mr Parsons suggested that they should go to the bar below the restaurant for a drink before they returned home that the family made a move. They left as they had entered, Mrs Parsons in the lead, her daughters following and Mr Parsons ambling along behind them, and this time the girls contrived to get a good look at the man Stephanie had described. Victoria, waiting for the others to file out ahead of her, had the best chance of all of them to study him. It was the man of the afternoon, this time elegantly dressed and, as her mother had remarked, in the company of a very pretty woman. He was smiling across the table at her and as she lifted her hand for a brief moment Victoria, who had excellent sight, clearly saw the rings on her left hand. His fiancée, his wife even. She felt a sudden surprising sensation of loss and after that one look followed Louise through the restaurant, aware as she went that he had seen her.
She spent the next morning shopping with her sisters, stocking up on soap and lipsticks and face powder because they were all so much cheaper in Guernsey. They were clustered round the door of ‘La Parfumerie’ arguing where they should go for their coffee when Victoria saw him again, looking exactly as he had done when she had met him, and accompanied by a man of his own age, similarly attired. He was holding a very small boy by the hand too, which substantiated her guess about the pretty girl with the rings. She stared after him and Louise, looking up, caught her at it and said at once: ‘There he is again, that man Stephanie was so smitten with—and that was a waste of time, ducky, he’s trailing a kid.’
They all laughed, and if Victoria’s laughter sounded a little hollow, nobody noticed. They went, arm-in-arm, into the arcade, to Maison Carré for coffee and enormous cream puffs, which should have spoiled their appetites for lunch, but didn’t.
As it turned out, Victoria went alone to Castle Cornet, for it began to rain after lunch and none of the others liked the idea of getting wet doing something which they could so easily do on a fine day, but Vicky, they all agreed, should certainly go if she had a mind to. After all, it was her holiday, and she, who would have gone whatever her sisters had said, agreed pleasantly to be home in good time because they were all going to the theatre that evening. All parties being